A practicum was developed to empower pre-service teachers to become more confident in their attempts to motivate and encourage young children to write. Emphasis was placed on the use of holistic philosophies relating to writing, in contrast to more conventional methodologies. Student participants included junior teacher candidates enrolled in…

This practicum sought to increase the opportunities for 17 first-grade students to write for real, human reasons and in natural circumstances. They were to use writing as a natural and acceptable outlet for expression, and to conceive of their writing as an extension of themselves. Each day a name was drawn to take home a stuffed bear, which…

This practicum was designed to improve the speech reading skills of mainstreamed elementary students with hearing impairments in their school environments. A 3-month one-on-one comprehensive speech reading program utilized analytical, synthetic, and holistic approaches, incorporated communication and language instruction with videotaping and…

This practicum was designed to reduce student apathy toward learning through the presentation of workshops and the conducting of collegial networking sessions in an effort to give teachers a broad base of strategies and interdisciplinary approaches that were intrinsically motivating to students. Four training workshops were designed and…

A practicum was designed to motivate children to read and to read for pleasure. Since reading is considered an important part of the daily curriculum of an elementary school and spills over into every discipline taught, reading appears to be a key to success in all curriculum areas. An in-class model for delivering remedial assistance was used…

A practicum was designed to give third-grade teachers a way to incorporate into the standard school day ongoing assessment techniques. The teachers used portfolios of the 140 children's work as an important, tangible and readily accessible record. The development and presentation of eight monthly workshops and ongoing classroom demonstration and…

Designed to expand the scope of the inservice reading program to help parents understand the whole language reading strategies used to remediate students, a practicum conducted a parent survey, carried out parent training sessions, and evaluated the program's success. The practicum focused on 323 parent participants from five Chapter 1 elementary…

The problem of families' limited access to community early childhood services and information was addressed in this practicum. Negative outcomes for young children and their families in a northeastern city were attributed to difficulties in locating and providing services for the developmental needs of children between birth and age 5. The…

The purpose of this practicum was to effect a substantial improvement in the academic and social profiles of 12 seventh-grade and 6 eighth-grade students with specific learning disabilities who had been targeted as potentially high risk candidates for dropping out of high school. Within a holistically based intervention model, five student…